World War II is known as the most horrible war in history. Although the main war was against Germany, we were also attacking the Japanese. At the Yalta conference Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill agreed that in the two or three months after Germany had surrendered and the war in Europe was over the Soviet Union would enter in the war against Japan. Although after the atomic bomb was created there was no longer any need for aid from the Soviet Union. The Japanese war ended in August 1945 when the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki by the United States. The first bomb, which was dropped on Hiroshima, was the first atomic bomb created by any country. Although the use of this bomb was highly cautioned, the United States saw using the bomb as an opportunity to end the war sooner without the loss of our own men. Germany had also been searching for this bomb and we were afraid that they might find it first. The first atomic bomb killed 70,000 people instantaneously, and the second left 80,000 people killed or missing. At the Casablanca Conference in January of 1943, FDR and Churchill agreed upon the demand of "unconditional surrender" from Japan. The atomic bomb was not strictly a military measure but it was devised to force Japan's unconditional surrender. .
The arguments that the atomic bomb was used to intimidate the Soviet Union are not complete arguments. For example H. H. Arnold's claim that we would have defeated the Japanese without the use of the atomic bomb is not complete in that it is hindsight and written after the war was over in 1949. His opinion can also be seen as biased since he was the Commander of the Air Force and he talks mostly of how if given enough time the Air Force would have forced Japan to surrender using only High Explosive bombs. (Doc. B) This statement is ironic since after the first atomic bomb wiped out 180,000 people the Japanese still refused to surrender.
